The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, saw few political consequences in supporting Donald Trump’s ouster of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff because he never had the support of the senators who wanted Gen Charles Brown to remain in the role, advisers close to the secretary said.
The ramifications of Trump’s decision to fire Brown and seven other senior officials at the Pentagon took on new urgency on Thursday after five former defense secretaries, outraged at Trump’s firings, urged Congress to hold hearings and extract justifications for their dismissals under oath.
But people close to the defense secretary said Hegseth felt that some senators who voted against his nomination, like Susan Collins who pushed for Brown to stay in his role, could be ignored because Hegseth never had their support in first place.
That calculus appears to have come into play when Hegseth met with Trump on 14 February to discuss the personnel moves, broadly agreeing that they should not have a joint chiefs chair or any other senior official who was associated with the Biden administration.
It could also be tested in the coming weeks as Congress weighs whether to entertain the letter and hold a series of hearings.
In the letter, former defense secretaries Lloyd Austin, Jim Mattis, Chuck Hagel, Leon Panetta and William Perry suggested that the Senate should block any new defense department nominees, including Gen Dan Caine, Trump’s pick to be the next joint chiefs chair.
“We are deeply alarmed by President Trump’s recent dismissals of several senior military leaders,” the letter said. “Trump’s dismissals raise troubling questions about the administration’s desire to politicize the military and to remove legal constraints on the president’s power.”
Trump consulted with Hegseth about the personnel changes and about a replacement for Brown, the people said. The final shortlist came down to two candidates: Gen Michael Kurilla and Caine. The New York Times earlier reported on the shortlist.
The first choice, Kurilla, appeared on paper to be the leading candidate as a four-star army general who oversees US military operations in the Middle East, which is one of the most high-profile assignments at the defense department.
The second was Caine, a more obscure retired three-star general in the air force, who missed out on promotion to be the chief of the national guard bureau during the Biden administration after serving as a former fighter pilot and top military liaison to the CIA.
Trump is understood to have favored Caine because he had not received his fourth star from Biden and he had come to admire him after a chance encounter in Iraq in 2019, when he told Trump that Islamic State could be defeated far more quickly than others had suggested.
In his Truth Social post, Trump referenced that discussion and called Caine “instrumental in the complete annihilation of the [Islamic State] caliphate”.
Trump had also raved about Caine’s hard-charging warfighter outlook in remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019. “I said, ‘Why didn’t my other generals tell me that? Why didn’t they tell me that?’” Trump said.
Trump has taken a special interest in the joint chiefs chair position in recent years and as his relationship with Gen Mark Milley, whom he appointed to the role in 2019, deteriorated to the point that he suggested during the 2024 presidential campaign that Milley had committed treason.
Trump’s problems with him began after Milley issued a public apology for walking across Lafayette Square in military fatigues with Trump and other political appointees for a photo op outside a church, which police had earlier cleared of a protest in response to George Floyd’s death.
Trump later asked Milley why he was not proud that he had accompanied “your president”. Trump considered Milley to be a grandstander after he said he was answerable not to the president but to the constitution, a person familiar with the exchange said.
After the January 6 Capitol riot, Milley also took steps to prevent Trump from misusing US nuclear weapons, a move that infuriated Trump when it was reported in the book Peril that Milley called the head of China’s military to say the “American government is stable”.
